


Until we are Bones

by tawg



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gore, M/M, Novakfest, bloodkink, vorarephilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-20
Updated: 2011-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-26 08:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once a vessel is filled up, it can never truly empty again. But they can adapt. They can grow beyond their purpose.</p><p>Written to fill the prompt, “After everything they've gone through it's not that surprising they'd meet during group therapy for PTSD”, with a side order of residual angel aspects.Fic includes: bloodkink, gore, non-violent death (OC), violent death (OC), and mild vorarephilia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Until we are Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fionhen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionhen/gifts).



He’s in a bar. He’s never been a big drinker, but he doesn’t know what to do with himself now. He’d stayed sober through the death of his family and now he wonders if maybe that was his downfall. Drinking doesn’t make him forget, could never make him forget the things he’s seen, the things his hands have done (gods, falling). But it clouds his judgement, makes it harder to think clearly. He is under the influence and not in his right mind, and if there’s one thing he’s learned it’s the terrible importance of the ability to consent...

A woman slips onto the stool beside him, and he can feel her eyes on the side of his face, on the skin that hasn’t healed. He can feel her heartbeat fluttering inside her chest, the skittering feet of a sparrow barely keeping its footing amid a beating gale of regret. She orders one of the same, and they stare at their drinks for a long moment, sensing one another without acknowledging. Her dark skin makes him feel overly conscious of his own pallor, of the wounds that-

“Hunter?” she finally asks. There’s an odd lilt to her voice, an accent that he can’t pick through that one, mumbled word.

(Of course he is, the distance of the country becoming meaningless, the feel of continents shifting and breaking beneath his feet, the smell of terror, the smell of acceptance, following the scent of his true vessel. Blood on his hands and it is the blood of the righteous, a war paint of a terrible star, rising from-)

“No,” he replies, though it takes effort to tear the word from his tongue. It hangs between them, and he can feel his own chest heaving, can feel the faint echo of bones snapping under his- no, not his anything. “But I’ve known a few.”

She nods at her drink, as if it had given her some sage advice. A deep conversation with alcohol, the kind he has never been able to achieve. She slides a card across the bar to him. “Look it up,” she says, and she downs her drink with slow, faltering swallows.

He runs a finger down the edge of the card, a plain white thing with plain words in plain Helvetica. _For all the things you can’t talk about._ He stares at it, feeling something too muted to be surprise, too condescending to be hope.

“Does this bullshit really help?” he asks, and it’s the closest his voice has come to sounding like his own for a long, long time.

“No,” she answers honestly, her palms flat and steady on the bar as she slides off the stool, an easy motion with her hips that belies strength and grace (no, not-) that she no longer uses. “But there’s free coffee, and it kills you a little slower.”

She walks away without a backward glance, leaves him staring at a card that he could crumble so easily (his hands have shattered skulls, have brought down mountains, could extinguish the sun).

The night moves on without him noticing. A man, and a card, and a drink that remains untouched.

*

It’s an all purpose room with chipped paint, plastic chairs with metal legs arranged on the dulled wooden floor in two circles. Those who have been possessed, and those who have had their lives ruined by everything else. He fits in neither circle, not completely. He can feel the taint of the meatsuits, the traces of sulphur still in their blood (the taste of blood pouring down his throat, no pauses to swallow). It makes his skin prickle, turns his stomach and makes a place deep inside that doesn’t exist anymore itch. He flexes his hands, and feels one of those wounds that aren’t healing fast enough crack and peel.

Even with the angel out of him, he’s still burning up, burning out.

Then a familiar presence steps through the yawning double doors across the room. They both freeze, their eyes locked on one another. The energy that fills them up and pours out of their eyes, out of their mouths, whites out the room and they can hear screaming, the screaming of those who have tainted souls, whose eyes are boiling in their skulls as the traces of sin are separated atom by atom from their bodies.

They both blink.

The room is as it had been. There is no blood, except for the sluggish trickle from his cracked hand, the too-raw scabs on the other man’s cheeks. They step around the room, circling one another warily. People are ushered to their circles, facilitators in jeans and army boots and shirts in earth tones – the body of a hunter is never truly camouflaged in a populated area – take their seats noisily. Creaking bones sinking into creaking plastic chairs, and everyone in the room is too broken, too tired for this shit.

The two of them end up standing between the circles, and there’s a symbolism there but they’re both so tired of symbols, of the pain that circles carve into their flesh. They stand nose to nose, blue eyes meeting blue. The light flickers above them and the smell of the room is sweat and that solid presence of screams. The other man’s voice comes from far away, rough and torn and so familiar, angelic in its brokenness.

“Let’s get out of here.”

And agreement is such a dangerous thing, but he nods, and together they fade away from that room of broken toys.

*

Nick had been a crumbling base of operations for Satan. Jimmy had been the structurally unsound apartment block of an angel who called itself God.

They both know the elaborate nature of grand plans and holy design too well to deny such things, but they’re not comfortable putting their post-occupation acquaintance down to anything other than chance. With so many angels walking on earth these past years, they agree, they were each bound to find another vessel eventually.

Jimmy admits that he can see vessels all the time, the potential to house an angel. Something about the shape of a person, the colour of them, and Nick understands completely these physical words acting as awkward description for something that exists on another plane altogether. Jimmy points out one vessel, a poor fit for an angel, too far removed from the bloodline to be anything but transient hosting, and Nick sees the confused aimlessness of goals never achieved. Jimmy motions to a vessel whose angel is dead, and Nick sees the yawning emptiness, a sadness that has no explanation in the vessel’s life. It’s cruel, the thinks, to let such people exist. To let such misery have an organic life, grief for something unknown and unsung polluting such already disagreeable forms. And then he catches a glimpse of the two of them, reflected in the glass window opposite.

Two pale faces, sunken eyes in sockets that are large and desperate, the skin that never seems to stop peeling, the fingernails that are never quite clean.

God is cruel indeed, to let such wretches walk his earth.

“He was just a little preoccupied,” Jimmy says, speaking of his own angel. Nick chuckles, and it’s the first time he’s laughed in years.

*

Neither of them talk of their times as vessels, but Nick doesn’t need to hear the words. The whole journey is written across the planes of Jimmy’s skin. Scars of a sigil splayed across his chest, and Nick knows why that one didn’t heal. He can remember the blissful smell of death, a room filled with fire and a little angel like a caged bird, kept safe from the world if only it would sing. Lucifer knew how to make anything sing. Nick remembers it because he was already burning by that point, already felt a kinship to the flame.

Jimmy and Castiel look nothing alike.

Jimmy is soft skin and bruised ribs, is pain and laughter and the passage of time. He is blood and sweat and decay, old meat, scraps. He is dying slowly, and Nick doesn’t have the words to describe how wonderful that is.

A pair of somnambulists, woken by the rising dawn of angelic light. Thawed out by fire and determination, the ice that humans build around the organs as a petty protection boiled away until there is nothing left behind but baked, blistering honesty.

*

They spend days together, existing. Jimmy had been flitting from hostels and missions; Nick had simply been walking until he stopped, paused until he found the need to walk again. They have both travelled so much in their second lives, are unsurprised at the heaviness of their feet in their third, perhaps final, existence.

Humans have always been noted for their desire to mend and heal, to place their stamp upon another creature somehow. A waitress who is too many years past young takes them home, her mouth a filthy colour and her hair the crackling texture of straw and lightning. Of course she is safe – they are both fathers, both clean men of the white-collar variety, and their hands are warm against her elbows, their voices smooth and quiet in the night air like swans gliding across still water.

These two men with their knowledge of bodies and their fragility (the ways necks can flex and arch, yet snap so quickly; the confident splay of fingers across skin and yet how fragile the bones of the hand can be; how easy it is to take a body into the grasp of something all-powerful and unseeable, how easy it is to fold it upon itself, straining, contorting, grinding from the inside without affecting the flesh until the pressure is too much, until the body becomes a fountain of reds and-). They pay too much attention to her body and not enough to the woman inside, and when it’s over they’re surprised at the distance they’ve travelled.

They appreciated her body as the oldest gods did, and the experience has made them mighty. She looks more like Nick’s wife than Jimmy’s daughter, but they compare the similarities later as they lie in her bed on sheets that stick to their skin. Her cooling body lies on the floor between this pair of flightless moths and the outside world.

They have both spent so much time being devout, watching their hands perform the will of God. They lie on their backs and try to find the energy to deal with a corpse. They lie in bed for days, until the corpse quietly starts to take care of itself.

In all honesty, what’s one more body?

*

Nick hasn’t had a job since he’d come home and found his family dead. In contrast, Jimmy doesn’t know how to stop moving. Once Jimmy’s work had been a means to an ends, something that he didn’t hate that ticked the right boxes, afforded him a good life. Now he has a crappy job stocking fruit in a crappier supermarket, and there are strong moments when that role defines him.

He was a husband, a father. He was the top ranked sales contractor in his firm. He was a vessel to a devout pair of wings that put their faith in the wrong (right) corner. For a few brief days, he was the body of a god.

Nick, who has never been good at filling the hours of the day, enjoys watching him. Enjoys leaning against shelves of tinned vegetables and watching Jimmy in his little black apron and his little cap with the store logo on the front. Enjoys watching him fill bell peppers and arrange bags of oranges. Enjoys watching him with the blunt store machete hanging from his belt, trimming the tops of pineapples and the bottoms of clusters of celery, his hands sure and the blade just sharp enough.

(Nick had been a chef in his first life. Had never been able to go back to that pristine kitchen with a fortune of knives hanging on the walls, never been able to look at the sharpness of a blade without thinking ‘Was this the one? Was it a knife like this one that slit her throat? That cut her so, so deeply?’ But he’s comfortable with blood now. Misses it, almost. The smell and the taste and the texture of it. They were all just sacks of blood, squishy bottles of the fluid that were needed to sustain bigger, more important things. Convenient little packages that he almost feels a lust for now, for that one useful thing they contained. The feel of it running down his skin, but-) No, it’s another crack on his cheek, another flake of his body falling away.

He thinks that Jimmy looks good with a knife in his hands.

When Jimmy tells him he should get a job, his thumb catching the blood trailing down Nick’s face and wiping it absently on his little supermarket chain apron, Nick nods. Nods as Jimmy marks himself so carelessly with Nick’s essence, as he watches Nick with his eyes dark and knowing.

*

Jimmy has such an odd affection for burgers. It’s something Nick hadn’t known until after he’d gotten the job he was far too qualified for.

(“I’ve been sick, for some time.” And it’s not a lie at all. A pain, though, having to put plasters over each blistering wound, the bright blue required by state law for those working in the industry of hospitality, not that anyone in that filthy kitchen would care enough to separate his stained bandages from the burger meat.)

He doesn’t know until Jimmy leans close, presses his chest to Nick’s back and inhales that smell of grease and burnt meat, makes a little humming noise in the back of his throat. Neither of them have eaten in the time since they found each other, but they still feel hunger. A kind of hunger.

“You should get cleaned up,” Jimmy suggests.

(“We’ll never be clean,” Nick doesn’t say in response.)

The body of a god stands in an air-conditioned room lit by flickering fluros and places apple after apple in one delicate display that looks dull up close, while the devil swelters in a dirty kitchen, surrounded by the thin blood of uncooked meat and the sizzling of flesh.

They would laugh if it didn’t make so much sense.

*

Jimmy bleeds easily, and they both innately know the cause and simultaneously live in complete ignorance of it. Nick’s skin blisters and boils, peels away to reveal the raw mess of him underneath, cracks with each expression that belongs more to the thing that had lit him up than to his own countenance.

But Jimmy bleeds like his skin is made of cloth. Blood seeping through and no matter how carefully it’s wiped away they can never find a wound underneath. He’s thin, too thin. There isn’t enough of him to even keep himself together. Nick’s skin peels and leaves behind thick scars (he has torn bodies limb from limb, has flayed flesh with his fingernails. A thousand tortures that have made him stronger, have given more and more to his self. One more body, he thinks, one more body and I’ll be-)

But Castiel had never possessed that killer instinct. Castiel had never needed to reinforce the walls that contained him. A perfect fit, he’d used Jimmy up from the inside out, leaving nothing but a paper-thin packaging. (A neat little package, holding so much in, holding so much that makes Nick’s mouth-)

Their bed sheets are always stained, their bins filled with gauze and handtowels they’re too lazy to wash. Their clothes don’t make it through the day, are always stiff and cracked with blood. Summer hits, and they both seem to sweat blood, spend whole days in the shower trying to wash one another clean, trying idly to find something unsoiled and whole left of their own bodies.

Jimmy has the odd habit of kissing a wound better. Nick is far less sweet in the way his tongue rasps at the slow seep of blood at Jimmy’s shoulder, but Jimmy is stronger than he looks, can press Nick against the wall (can knock down walls with his fist, can wear the blood of angels as rings around his fingers, can cup the souls of purgatory within his hands and inhale them, turning them to dust with the desperation of his hunger).

Jimmy can press Nick against the wall and wrap those long, dangerous fingers around aching flesh, can take and take everything there is and steal what’s left, his mouth hard and demanding, desperate to consume, desperate and needing and demanding and a force to be reckoned with. A force that takes the air from Nick’s lungs in the form of promises, bites at the flesh of Nick’s neck as the most obvious display of power and fury and desire, takes every offering there is to be given until Nick is on his knees with the cold water and the rivulets of blood raining down on him as he professes his love for his new-

*

They don’t eat. The bleeding doesn’t stop, the decay.

Jimmy gets told by his store manager to go home, to see a doctor. He puts his lips by her ear, whispers to her of the empty place deep down inside, that place that can never be filled. His voice drops lower, too low to be heard, and he talks to her soul in the language of broken things.

Jimmy looked good with a knife, but Castiel’s strength had never been with a sword.

It’s an interesting experience, Jimmy admits later, being cruel for the fun of it. Her blood had soaked his shirt, and Nick is licking lazy stripes across his stomach, admiring the mixed flavours on his cracking palate.

“It’s a good thing,” Nick tells him. “They need to know their faults, their weaknesses.”

“Are we any better for knowing ours?” Jimmy counters. He bites at Nick’s hand, the fleshy muscle at the base of his thumb, enjoys feeling the skin bruise under his blunt teeth. One of Jimmy’s teeth is loose in its gum and Nick is waiting to it to fall out, is waiting for the chance to take that little pearl on his tongue and grind it up, for that powdered sugar of bone to coat his throat all the way down, to drink the blood that will pour freely until Jimmy’s mouth is licked clean, until his flesh has the chance to fill up that deep hole-

Nick kisses him, kisses him and presses him back into their filthy nest lined with bones and skin and hair that still crackles against flesh, presses together those two bodies that are failing them, tastes the blood that he likes the best.

Of course, his tongue says at it swipes across damp and tacky skin. We are so much better.

*

Nick doesn’t last much longer in the employment stakes, finishes his last shift of wielding a spatula and wearing a stupid paper hat within the week. He stays late to help close up, to collect his final pay. When the doors are locked, he shoves his manger’s hand into the chip fryer and holds it there.

He’d forgotten how damn loud humans could be.

He pushes the purplish head under, relieved at how that speeds up the process. Soft tissues should be cooked gently, he recalls, to maintain structural integrity. Humans have no integrity.

He takes a steel pot of the oil home with him. He’d wanted to show Jimmy how flesh had been boiled away from the bone. Look at the colours, he wants to say, look at the beautiful thing I did. Jimmy dips his fingers in the lukewarm oil wonderingly, grasps at the glossy substance, holds his arms up and lets it rain down over him. He is naked and slick, his face split into a grin as he rubs deep fried blood and muscle against his skin, as he runs his tongue along his forearm and feasts on the remnants of such a worthless life.

Nick watches the display with his legs spread, absently palming his cock. Jimmy is magnificent in the shine of the human sacrifice made to his glory, is love and vengeance embodied and towers over Nick as he indulges in the basest kind of worship, that of the flesh.

*

Jimmy’s fingernails are black now, the skin underneath them dying, blood unable to escape. When he sleeps on his side, blood will trickle out one ear, writing little notes of lust and promise on the pillows. Nick’s fingers are stiff, the bones knitting together at the joints. His whole body blistering apart and healing and blistering again.

It’s hard to tie up shoelaces.

It’s hard to leave their stolen apartment.

It’s hard to find sanctuary in the shower, Jimmy’s skin is so fragile and Nick’s so prone to sloughing off.

“We can’t keep going on like this,” Jimmy says, and the inside of his mouth is red with blood.

(Just a little longer, just a few months more and they’ll decay together, their bodies will fall apart and blend and coalesce, and something new will rise from the gestalt ashes of failed skin.)

“What else can we do?” Nick asks, his lips thick with new tissue that doesn’t sit right.

Jimmy picks at a fingernail, peeling it off, pressing at the thin skin until it splits. The blood underneath is black and thick, partly congealed and already suffocated. He wipes the mess absently on the table top, and it sits there as a lumpy streak. All Nick wants to do is reach out and catch it on his fingertips, paint it against Jimmy’s skin until it’s forced back inside Jimmy’s veins, until his skin splits and Nick can sink his hands into that beautiful body, torn flesh hugging his wrists, caressing his elbows as Nick reaches inside him and tears him-

“There might be one person who can help us,” Jimmy says.

It takes a long time for the words to sink in, for Nick to realise that Jimmy is (for the moment) still whole. “And how would we get to South Dakota?” he asks, allowing sarcasm and disdain to fill his voice because his lungs haven’t been working so well of late, have been growing hard inside.

Jimmy grins at him, and the lines between his teeth are painted red by the grace of bleeding gums.

*

They steal a car. They tuck the body into the boot because Nick has always hated unnecessary waste. They both used to compost, back in their first lives, and that strikes them as hilarious now. They laugh as they drive, windows wound down and large, cracked sunglasses covering Jimmy’s eyes, making those points of blue light indistinct under a layer of blood on glass.

They build a fire in the middle of nowhere and cook flesh over flames that are motivated more by gasoline than by any talent in arranging logs and kindling. The smell of burning flesh makes Jimmy’s eyes fall closed, makes his mouth water. The blood they’d drained from the body (most of it, at least) sits cold in a plastic container between Nick’s knees, is slick on his fingers as he smears it over his skin, as he crawls over to Jimmy and presses his hands (presses that single precious commodity that humans hoard in their veins) against the weeping tears of tissue paper flesh.

Their mouths find one another, broken and perfect under the summer desert sky. South Dakota is still two states away. They probably won’t make it. They probably won’t need to.

They’re going to be fine.


End file.
